 Welcome to JSA TV, the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals. I'm Jamie Skado-Cutaya of JSA and welcoming here on JSA TV we have Ms. Elaine Stafford. She is the managing partner of DRG undersea consulting. And Elaine, longtime friend, such an honor to have you again on JSA TV. It's always a pleasure to be with you, Jamie. You and your team are just fantastic and we really look forward to everything that you do for us in this business and help us move our business forward. Really is great. So thank you for inviting me back. Thank you, Elaine. Thank you. And since the last time we talked actually here last year at ITW, we did a JSA TV. Great little piece to, if you guys want to check that one out as well, continuing the conversation here at ITW 2018. Can you share with us what has DRG been up to in the last year? I think you know that the undersea world is really on an upswing right now. Some people worry a little bit that it's a boom. We don't see it as a boom at all but DRG has been really happy to be working with clients across the globe and building new systems. You know, last year we had just finished two new projects across the Atlantic. We're working on two others now across the Atlantic, several across the Pacific and starting to get more into the Middle East and Africa world. So it's really, really busy. And on top of that, one of the things that I like doing most is we get involved with a lot of developers or financiers doing market studies or due diligence projects, people trying to find that golden nugget. What's the next important project that they could be part of and which ones are the ones that really aren't going to be the best ones for them and helping them figure that out is really something DRG looks forward to doing with our clients. And with that subsea consulting expertise that you guys are known for with that perspective, what do you see as driving all this subsea capacity need? Well, the fundamental thing is demand and it's very hard to characterize the sources of demand but we know over the last decades it's continued to grow and grow and the growth rates are doing nothing but getting even larger than before and it's driven by data center to data center communication and the world's dependence on communication across the globe. But that underlying demand is driving new cables but also a lot of the world's cables are older than they were before and they're aging and people need to replace them and then we've got these new providers, the content providers, the Facebooks, the Amazons, the Googles, the Microsofts who all want to own their own assets, they want to build new cables and they want to build a lot of cables on different routes so that they make sure that their networks stay up and running. So all of those things are happening along with some of the changes in technology and the ability to do things with technology that maybe you can't do quite as much as you could in some ways with respect to capacity as you could before with the Shannon limit approaching on fiber and so there are a lot of things driving new cables across the globe and quite honestly I don't remember being this busy for a long, long time. It's like, you know, we were talking a couple of years ago about the Hibernia Network's transatlantic cable crossing and that was the first time in 10, 12-year history where there was any transatlantic build and now, you know, with the Mareya and... Mareya and Haferu and Bousa, you know, three down to South America in the last year, right? So it's just booming. It's booming. It's crazy. But let me just say again, we don't see this as a boom-bust cycle at all. We really see it as a steady growth path for quite some time. So it's a good time to be in the business. And for sure, you know, cables that have been in the water for 10, 12 years, they're at capacity or just nearing their life end. So we need to replace this, right? Well, Jamie, now I'm going to contradict what you just said. I'm sorry. But, you know, cables are designed to last for 25 years and actually there's a growing sentiment that they may actually perform adequately even longer. And it really is as much the economic life as the technical life of them. And so it's...they are aging and people want to replace them as they get older, but cables are in service that have been in service for 18, 20 years and they aren't being turned down just yet. So...but the boom was virtually 20 years ago now. And if cables are designed for 25 years, cables can take 3 to 5 years at least to build. So people are planning to replace them and complement them. So...and...well, enough of that. No, that's exciting and great intelligence there. So tell us about...we're talking new technologies. So what are the new technologies influencing the subsea construction marketplace today and how do you and your clients navigate new applications, such as Rotom and other transmission technologies? So you hit on one of the important ones for a lot of people and that's WSS Rotom's wavelength Rotoms that allow customers to select which wavelengths they want and change it over time. And these WSS Rotoms are just now being developed to go into the service...into the water within the next year or so. And figuring out how to architect them into the network with the ownership requirements that different investors want. A lot of the content providers really want to manage their own fiber pair and integrate it into their bigger global network. And they want to have that partition, secure, independent control to manage their network and to change their wavelengths without any interference from their partners. They want that independence. And so that's one of the tricks and I think that often has to be integrated into some of the commercial agreements up front which is a particularly fun thing to do and fascinating and a bit of a challenge. I see new ownership models coming out that will kind of look at some of the technology that's evolving and integrate some of that capability into the commercial models. Another thing that's come up in the past few years is the C plus L technology. I mentioned earlier that the capacity per fiber pair is really challenged. It used to be that all the transmission is in what we call the C band part of the fiber and now the L band is now opened up and there's a big trans-specific system that's being constructed right now that'll use C plus L band technology almost doubling the capacity per fiber pair of a cable. People are putting more fiber pairs into cables as well so that's allowing the capacity per cable to really go up. There's only one other system that I'm aware of so far that's really talking about C plus L technology but eventually it will take on. I think sometimes when these things are so new and novel nobody wants to be the second until they see the first work and it's pretty clear this first one will be done pretty soon and I'm quite confident it's going to be a success. So those are some of the things. Oh, that's so exciting. And so as we're forward-looking and we're looking at new technologies what also is forward-looking for DRG? What do you guys think you'll be up to in the next six to 12 months from now? What I'm looking forward to is projects that connect places in different ways than they have before. We've seen over many, many years systems get longer and longer enabled by the technology so an example I like to give people is that when I started in this industry however many years ago it was the trans-Pacific systems were mostly between Japan and the U.S. because that was the shortest distance from Asia to California. It became China to U.S. when the technology enabled that. Now it's China, Hong Kong to U.S. and we've got several systems that are planned from Hong Kong to the U.S. now. And in construction, Singapore to U.S.A. is the next one after that. And the technology is enabling these new places but the express paths over these longer distances really allows people to securely connect their data centers without intermediate landings which is a real boon. I think combining that with the WSSs and the changing models of OTTs working with carriers who I think some of the carriers right now feel like their wholesale business is diminishing and it is in part because the OTTs are building their own cables instead of buying capacity from them and figuring out new ways to let everybody work together constructively without saying you know it's us or you or us or them I think it's something that we really look forward to doing as time progresses because there's room for everybody in the market and working together. This industry has long been one of people working together and cooperating even though they're competitors and I think we'll see more of that and find new ways of doing that in the future. All about co-opetition. Right, all about co-opetition. It is always such a pleasure and honor to speak with you Elaine. Thank you so much for taking your time today at ITW and thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV Happy networking.